I know, I know, it’s been ages since I last was here! But fear not, I have not forgotten 🙂 The work – actually the homework for the design school – has been taking every minute of my free time over the last few weeks… but more about it later.

First, let me share with you the amazing news – a new series has just started on the BBC and it is about product design! This has been my first passion – applied art and product designs have been my passions even before I started thinking about full-blown interior design. I find it amazing how everything that surrounds us has been designed by someone even if we don’t think about it, and that – as opposed to fine arts – an object of beauty can be also an object of function.

But – back to the topic: the amazing, the great, the best, the ingenious, the inspiring, the genious Philippe Starck is hosting ‘Design for Life‘, a program about 12 young Brits spending a few weeks in Starck’s design agencyin Paris in hope that one of them can be the future of design in the UK. The main prize is a 6-month placement at Starck’s, but even those ten weeks are more than any designer could ever dream of, so all the best to the participants and let’s hope we’ll see some great designs! You can see the first episode here.

And if you don’t know what Starck designed, here are some of the iconic objects:

What I really liked is his design philosophy, or rather life philosophy, some of it we could observe already in the first episode. As he said, ‘we are not artists‘. What designers do, or should do, is to create functional and sustainable products for the masses. Also interesting was how important to him the history behind a product is. What is it made of is an obvious question, but is it functional enough? Who made it? How? Does it make sense? Does it show the way forward? The designer need to think really outside of the final product. He controversially criticised a lovely bicycle brought as an example of an ecologically sound product by one of the contestants. It cost only €90, which is why Starck dismissed it as a product most probably done by people who earn almost nothing. How else can you create this complicated piece of technology for so little? Stay tuned for next episodes!